It's not hyperbole to say we've become a police state

Sickening. I published similar
statistics a few weeks ago. There
are about 138,000 federal law-enforcement officers, or 2,760 per
state. Even the Dept of Education
has some. There has been
nothing in the presidential debates about this. I fear that the only
solution is to shutter all agencies, repeal the laws that established
them, go back to the Constitution, and start over.

For years, the public face of federal law
enforcement has been the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Today, for many people, the knock on the door is
increasingly likely to come from a dizzying array of other police forces tucked
away inside lesser-known crime-fighting agencies.

They
could be from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Labor or Education departments, the National Park Service,
the Bureau of Land Management or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, the agency known for its weather forecasts.

Agents from NOAA, in fact, along with the Fish
and Wildlife Service, raided the Miami
business of Morgan Mok in 2008, seeking evidence she had broken the Endangered
Species Act trading in coral.

The
agents had assault rifles with them, and the case documents indicated her house
and business records had been under surveillance over a six-month period, says
Ms. Mok. Under the 1973 law, the departments of Interior and Commerce (home to
NOAA) must write regulations to define what is endangered and how it must be
protected. One of those regulations specifies coral.

"I felt like I was being busted for drugs,
instead of coral," Ms. Mok says. "It was crazy."

Ms. Mok says she showed that her coral had been
properly obtained. She paid a $500 fine and served one year of probation for
failing to complete paperwork for an otherwise legal transaction.

Adam Fetcher of the Department of the Interior,
which includes Fish and Wildlife, says the department and its bureaus
"follow priorities in line with other federal law-enforcement agencies. We
work within the resources appropriated by Congress to effectively follow up and
investigate criminal and civil violations."

Government
agencies of all stripes have become the front-line enforcers for many of the
laws Congress has written the past four decades. Not only do the agencies
enforce these laws, they also write the voluminous regulations needed to put
the laws into effect and govern federal programs.

Often, Congress makes it a criminal offense to
violate any part of a law it passes—including these regulations. As a result,
as more criminal laws are passed, the number of regulations that can ensnare
people grows as well.

It is hard to pin down precisely how many
regulations could result in criminal penalties. Of dozens of federal agencies
contacted by The Wall Street
Journal, none could say how many of their regulations were connected to
criminal statutes. Legal experts have put this number at anywhere between
10,000 and 300,000.

In 1970, the Code of Federal Regulations had
54,000 pages. Today it runs to
165,000 pages and takes 27 feet of shelf space when printed and bound.

The
growing rule book has kept enforcement teams busy. Last year, criminal cases
pursued chiefly by smaller government agencies led to 10,122 convictions, an
84% increase from 15 years ago. Also up sharply: the numbers of prosecutions
and investigators.

In the latest survey, by the Government Accountability Office in 2006, there were
25,000 sworn officers in the smaller government agencies (which excludes
departments more commonly associated with crime fighting: Treasury, Justice, Defense and what is now Homeland
Security). That number includes police,
inspectors, security guards and rangers, as well as criminal investigators.

Across all government agencies, there were about
138,000 federal law-enforcement officers that year, GAO figures show. The Justice Department accounted for more than 40%
of that total.

Among the smaller agencies, currently there are
3,812 criminal investigators, up from 507 in 1973, the first year for which
records are available from the Office of Personnel Management. The EPA received its first two criminal
investigators in 1977. It now has 265.

Even critics of the system say it is important
to uphold the law and that criminal sanctions are sometimes necessary. "There are cases that should and can be made,"
says Roger Marzulla, a Justice Department official in the Reagan administration
who oversaw environmental-crime prosecutions. Enforcing regulations also
ensures that rule-breakers don't have an unfair advantage over competitors, he
says.

An August raid on Gibson Guitar Corp. has drawn
heavy criticism from both sides of the political aisle. In that raid, Fish and
Wildlife Service agents swarmed the Nashville
company to seize rosewood and ebony the agency suspected had been illegally
imported from India.
The company says its wood was
obtained legally and that no charges have been filed.

"Why is it we're treating what is
essentially a violation of rules and regulations in a criminal manner?"
says Tom Fitton, president of
Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group.

Steven Benjamin, president-elect of the National
Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, which tends to be more liberal, says:
"Enforcing over-criminalization has put us at war with ourselves."

Skeptics also say some of these smaller
departments tend to wield their powers indiscriminately, even for seemingly
minor infractions, in ways that seem self-justifying.

"When you start making innocuous actions
crimes, you multiply the number of people who are enforcing" the laws and
regulations, says Ronald Gainer, a
former Justice Department official for Democratic and Republican
administrations who has cautioned for years against the proliferation of
federal law. "You multiply the number of people who have to enforce
criminal laws and they all want guns."

Often, it is the agencies' own internal
inspectors-general who blow the whistle on problems with other officers in the
department. In a stinging 2010 report, the inspector general for the Commerce
Department focused on widespread complaints from fishermen in Massachusetts,
North Carolina and Florida that
criminal investigators from NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service's Office
of Law Enforcement were being heavy-handed, even in civil cases.

The
report detailed a 2006 case where a warrant affidavit for a fish dealer's
records contained false information, and another case where an agent gained
unauthorized access to a facility, then opened another door to let other
officers in.

"The
reality is that if you hire a cadre of criminal investigators, they're going to
carry out their work like criminal investigators—and that's what they
did," says inspector general Todd
Zinser.

NOAA officials say the agency has improved its
enforcement program since the report, with new leadership and more scrutiny of
charging decisions. It has also frozen hiring for criminal investigators and
employed more officers to help fishermen with compliance.

"I think that we agreed that there was a
need for a more balanced perspective in the makeup of our work force,"
says Eric Schwaab, Assistant Administrator for Fisheries.

Christopher Kortlander met two dozen agents from
several different federal agencies when they burst into the tiny Custer Battlefield
Museum he founded in Garryowen, Mont.,
in 2005.

Mr. Kortlander has said in court filings
protesting his treatment that "24 or more federal agents, armed and
brandishing automatic weapons" participated in the raid. In an interview,
he said he counted agents from the Bureau of Land Management, FBI, Fish and
Wildlife Service, National Park Service and several other forces. One of Mr.
Kortlander's interns was pushed to the ground in the raid, he says.

The
agents sought artifacts they said were being sold online under false pretenses
as historical items found at Little Bighorn, scene of the bloody 1876 battle
between Indians and the U.S. Army. No charges were brought against Mr.
Kortlander. But agents returned in 2008, that time alleging Mr. Kortlander was
in illegal possession of eagle feathers.

Again, no charges were filed. Mr. Kortlander
denies wrongdoing. In 2009, federal prosecutors took the rare step of notifying
Mr. Kortlander's attorney in writing that it wouldn't be pursuing charges in
connection with either raid.

Mr. Kortlander is suing the government in
federal court to recover some Cheyenne
bonnets taken by the Bureau of Land Management during the second raid.

"They
raid these people like they're Scarface," says Penelope Strong, Mr.
Kortlander's attorney. Using force to go after drug dealers or violent
criminals is understandable, Ms. Strong says. "But somebody in a hot,
sultry part of Montana,
in a trading post where people are wandering around buying blankets? Come
on."

The
agencies referred inquiries about the case to the U.S.
attorney's office in Montana.
A spokesman declined to comment, citing the lawsuit.

Postal inspectors, customs and other revenue
agents were some of the first federal law-enforcement officers in the years
after the Revolution. In the 19th century, Congress created forces to guard
federal buildings and to police the expanding American West. After the Civil
War, the federal government set up the Department of Justice and stepped up
controls of immigration, alcohol and drugs.

The
Department of the Interior and the Forest Service received new responsibilities
under the environmental legislation sought by President Theodore
Roosevelt in the early 20th century. But the foundation for the current growth
of federal enforcement agencies was laid in the 1960s and 1970s when smaller
departments started having inspectors general whose task was to police the
government. Lawmakers writing sweeping environmental laws in that era also
granted additional resources to the agencies administering those laws. That, in turn, created new enforcement teams.

Lawmakers and traditional law-enforcement
agencies, in particular the FBI, resisted extending the power to carry
firearms, execute warrants and make arrests to other agencies, says Jeffrey
Bumgarner, a professor of government at Minnesota State
University who has
written a history of federal law enforcement. But agencies chipped away at that
opposition, he says.

EPA agents were given police powers in 1988. The U.S.
Marshals Service started issuing annual blanket authorizations in 1995 to some
agencies that didn't have them.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the
FBI's attention shifted to terrorism matters, Congress gave permanent powers to
inspectors general in more than two dozen agencies.

All of the officers are trained at one of the Federal Law Enforcement
Training
Center facilities now run
by the Department of Homeland Security. About 90 federal agencies send their
personnel to the centers for training in everything from criminal
investigations to cyber terrorism and land-management police training.

In the mid-1990s, many agencies tried to scale
back their vigor in pursuing criminal prosecutions amid concern among members
of Congress about aggressive tactics. An influential 1994 memo by Earl Devaney,
then head of the Environmental Protection Agency's criminal-enforcement program,
suggested applying criminal sanctions to only "the most significant and
egregious violators."

Mr. Devaney's advice didn't stick, and the
numbers are rising. In 2010 there were 12,606 prosecutions from cases
investigated chiefly by agencies other than Justice, Treasury,
Defense and Homeland Security. That
was a 50% increase from 15 years ago.

In September, former oil-refinery manager Hubert
Vidrine Jr. was awarded $1.67 million from a malicious-prosecution lawsuit he
filed against the EPA. The judge
said she would have made it higher if not limited by federal law. Mr. Vidrine's
troubles began in September 1996, when the agency's criminal-investigation
division led nearly two-dozen armed federal and state authorities on Canal
Refining Co., an oil refinery in Church
Point, La.

Mr. Vidrine described in an interview a scene of
guns, police dogs, flashing lights and roadblocks. At one point, according to
court documents filed in the lawsuit, agents refused to allow female employees
to use the bathroom and prevented them from phoning their homes or child-care
providers to make arrangements for their children.

The
plant, which employed about 260 people, shut down refining operations the
following year and is idle now.

Mr. Vidrine was charged in 1999 with
"knowingly" storing hazardous waste, which later turned out to be
used refined oil not covered by federal regulations. The
potential penalty was five years and a $50,000 fine for each day of the violation.
The case was dismissed in 2003, by
which time Mr. Vidrine had spent more than $120,000 in legal fees maintaining
his innocence, according to a statement by the judge.

The
lead EPA agent in the case pleaded guilty Oct. 3 to charges he lied under oath
and obstructed justice. A few days earlier, federal judge Rebecca Doherty sided
with Mr. Vidrine in his lawsuit.

The
EPA declined to comment, citing potential further action by the Justice
Department. In recent weeks the Justice Department filed a notice that it plans
to appeal the case to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals—promising to push a
case that began in 1996 into 2012.

The
regulations that spurred the raid were so complex they had led to disagreements
among EPA personnel, as well as state environmental quality personnel, the
judge noted in her opinion. She called the regulations a "morass."

Judge Doherty wrote that, "Given the
egregious conduct displayed by an agent of the government and the devastation
wrought on otherwise law-abiding citizens," she would have given Mr.
Vidrine more than $1.67 million, if federal law allowed punitive damages
against the government, "in the hope of deterring such reckless and
damaging conduct and abuse of power in the future."